Windows 7 users with a solid background color faced delayed login process — it took four months for Microsoft to fix

Starting up a Windows 7 PC used to be slower for users who favored simple solid color backgrounds over extravagant desktop wallpapers. The delayed startup issue was present back in 2009, for about four months, when Windows 7 was the newest OS on the block. This bewildering phenomenon recently caught the eye of Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen, who ponders over the underlying code problems in his latest Old New Thing blog post.

Chen is a solid color deskto pbackground devotee, favoring a bluish-green background hue, and has retained this preference since Windows 95. I had always been the same, until SSDs became affordable - eschewing bitmap wallpapers for simple, clean, solid colors – thinking that it would also be easier on my meager RAM and the spinning rust. Sadly, this wasn't the case between the launch of Windows 7 in June 2009 and sometime in November the same year. Yes, Microsoft ironed out this wrinkle after about four months of Windows 7's reign.

So, what was the issue slowing down the Windows 7 startup process for solid color lovers? Even without knowledge of OS coding, the reason for the extra wait seems easy enough to grasp. It turns out that the Windows 7 logon system was waiting for the desktop wallpaper bitmap to load and a report that this process was complete. Thus, those who frowned upon using graphical background frills were punished by a timeout wait – for up to 30 seconds - before the Windows Welcome screen got out of the way.

Chen provides example code, showing a process that he reckons caused the delay. "The code to report that the wallpaper is ready was inside the wallpaper bitmap code, which means that if you don’t have a wallpaper bitmap, the report is never made, and the logon system waits in vain for a report that will never arrive," he explains.

Windows veteran Chen also noted that other potential victims of the full 30-second startup delay were the perverse folks who preferred to 'Hide desktop icons.'

Lastly, we want to make clear that the shunning of wallpaper, or desktop icons, didn't add 30 second to the Windows 7 startup time. "Rather, the Welcome screen stays on for the full 30 seconds rather than the actual time it took for all systems to report ready (which could be 5 seconds, or it could be 25 seconds, depending on your system’s performance)," wrote Chen on his blog post.